Building on the data-driven approach championed by search engine marketers, demand side platforms are now enabling display advertisers to replace much of the guesswork of traditional media plans, and advertisers are now starting to use consumer search data to retarget display advertising.
Marketing industry experts give their opinions on where digital marketing is going. Will geo-location services tranform mobile advertising? Will search and display become rivals?
Some or the impressions you pay result in almost no clicks, and some clicks that bounce like rubber balls. That doesn't necessarily mean your search marketing money is wasted.
The rise of RTB is the biggest story of 2010 in online advertising, and has been written about extensively in ad industry publications. But people outside of advertising don't seem to know anything about it.
The advent of audience-targeted real-time buying systems, whether ad exchanges like those operated by Google and Yahoo or inventory aggregators like AdMeld, has led to a flood of investment in the many players building this new display ad architecture.
Social media is now the norm. But there's no need to abandon search, display, and email just yet. Here's how social media can complement traditional digital marketing and boost ROI in a few short months.
Although it's not all roses, the trends in online advertising are largely positive, especially after such a difficult year in 2009. One key to realizing this promising future is ensuring that the whole marketers put together adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
While the rise of ad networks may have made the process of media buying easier, it can be argued that they didn't necessarily make it more effective. That in turn has led to the advent of ad exchanges.
There are so many advertising networks out there -- with more starting up all the time -- that it's a challenge to differentiate them. Perhaps it's time for a revival of the direct representation business model.
So far, the online video ad ecology doesn't suffer from the complexity that plagues the display ad supply chain. Two charts, one outlining the display market and one the video value chain, illustrate the difference.